We have reached our breaking points. There are murders and attempted murders almost every day. We try to make agreements, to improve their living conditions, to use the minimum amount of force necessary to protect ourselves. We knock on roofs, shoot rubber bullets, issue work permits, dismantle communities because there is a claim of Palestinian ownership, approve the same building plans over and over without building. They kill Jews.

Nobody in Jewish Israel wants to say that the ideal of coexistence with the 20% of our population that are Arabs is unobtainable, that we are getting farther away from it as time goes by rather than closer. But that’s how it seems today.

In the age of intersectionality, it is taken as a given that racism against blacks in the US and “oppression” of Palestinians by Israel are similar phenomena, and that opposition to one kind of oppression demands opposition to all. This analogy is embarrassingly stupid.

Chanukah is not a holiday about our violent intolerance of others as Binyamin Zahav seems to suggest. It is a holiday of freedom from anti religious tyranny imposed by a kingdom bent on eradicating our faith and traditions.

Hanukah is a celebration of Jewish nationalism (which does not exist without God) and not a holiday of religious holiness although there are some prayers that are specifically associated with Hanukah. It similar to celebrating Israel’s Independence Day which also commemorates the victory of a tiny group of stubborn Jews fighting for sovereignty and freedom, against an enemy much more powerful and well equipped and – by the grace of God – WINNING.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Sixty-eight years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light.

There is no sign that anti-Semitism will decline anytime soon, so there is every reason to increase our efforts in fighting it. And for each of us, that means attacking it at home, not at the neighbor’s home.

Recently Israel allowed herself to be humiliated by Hamas, which burned thousands of acres of her fields and forests, and then launched the most intense rocket bombardment in Israel’s history. Our response, bombing unoccupied military targets, was tactically significant but psychologically impotent. The Jew-haters were gratified, because the Jews lived up to the stereotype: powerful and controlling, and yet at the same time weaklings who are afraid to fight.

Chanukah is a holiday about Jews fighting against assimilation a lesson which needs to be reinforced over and over here in the galut (diaspora). The holiday and candles are also a reminder that in Judaism, the light of God begins in the home lit by the observance of a single family unit, and just like the Chanukiah (Menorah) that light is supposed to radiate from the home to the community and eventually throughout the world.

The fact that such a measure is seriously thought to be needed is an indication of the furious political/culture war that is being waged in Israel today, between a small avant-garde of academics, artists, and media people, and the rest of Israeli society.

Airbnb titles its decision “Listings in Disputed Regions”, but it mentions one and only one “region”, which it calls “Israeli settlements in the West Bank”. Apparently, the Airbnb “experts” are not aware of other disputed regions that Airbnb still services